Entrepreneurs / Small Business  April 21, 2021

Most workers don’t want to return to office full time post-pandemic

More than half of American office workers — 52% — don’t want to return to the office full-time when the pandemic comes to an end. Instead, they’d prefer to work in a hybrid fashion, sometimes from their home offices and sometimes from the office.

Workers feel so strongly about their future working conditions that 29% of them say they will leave their employer if forced to return to an all in-person office environment.

Those were some of the results of surveys performed by McKinsey & Co. and shared by Andrea Alexander, an associate partner at McKinsey and the keynote speaker today at the 2021 Talent Summit hosted by the Northern Colorado chambers of commerce, economic-development agencies and communities of the region.

“The No. 1 request pre-pandemic by employees was for ‘more flexibility,’” Alexander said. “Now that they’ve tasted it, they don’t want to go back.”

Some do, of course. About 37% of workers would like to go back to fully on-site working, with 11% wanting fully remote workplaces. The majority, however, would take hybrid — working sometimes from home and sometimes from the office.

Employers are faced with the challenge of deciding how they want to operate once health concerns from the pandemic fall into the past, she said. 

Alexander outlined several pitfalls to avoid when making that decision. Among them:

  • Don’t assume recent success with remote working will translate into future success.
  • Don’t wait to communicate until you have perfect clarity — instead, employers should say what they can now, involve employees in decisions, and refine their decisions as information becomes clearer.
  • Don’t develop one solution for all. The work to be done will help determine where it can be done. Customers will influence what the workplace needs to be.
  • Don’t allow flexibility to be determined unilaterally by employees or department managers, who may have biases.
  • Don’t focus on financial savings alone, because cost is just one factor to consider in the decision. Equity between in-office and at-home workers needs consideration, so that promotions and treatment are based on merit and not who the boss sees more often.

She advised employers to consider the long-established work patterns of the office and what’s been learned over the past year when many employees have worked from home. 

She said only 33% of employers have communicated what they plan to do when the pandemic ends. “Companies honestly don’t know what they’ll do. Now’s the time to figure it out,” Alexander said.

She acknowledged that a hybrid model will be more difficult to manage, and it runs the risk of creating two cultures within a company. Yet it may be the future of work in the country.

She said people come to the office to connect, and that’s important. 

A later speaker, Jim Nottingham, global head and general manager of HP Inc.’s Advance Compute & Solutions group in Fort Collins, said working with creative companies such as Tesla, Dreamworks and NASA that are changing the world, shows the benefit of finding ways to work together, whether remotely or in person. 

“People get sparks of magic to innovate by being together,” he said. He said collaboration spaces will be important as companies adopt hybrid models of work. 

“How do we take advantage of what we’ve been through to make things better? Our best days haven’t happened yet, but we’ve learned that making it easy to work anytime also means making it easy to work all of the time,” he said.

© 2021 BizWest Media LLC

More than half of American office workers — 52% — don’t want to return to the office full-time when the pandemic comes to an end. Instead, they’d prefer to work in a hybrid fashion, sometimes from their home offices and sometimes from the office.

Workers feel so strongly about their future working conditions that 29% of them say they will leave their employer if forced to return to an all in-person office environment.

Those were some of the results of surveys performed by McKinsey & Co. and shared by Andrea Alexander, an associate partner at McKinsey and the keynote speaker today at…

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Ken Amundson is managing editor of BizWest. He has lived in Loveland and reported on issues in the region since 1987. Prior to Colorado, he reported and edited for news organizations in Minnesota and Iowa. He's a parent of two and grandparent of four, all of whom make their homes on the Front Range. A news junkie at heart, he also enjoys competitive sports, especially the Rapids.
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